


The Anatomy of Existence

by Midday



Category: Gintama
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Genderqueer Character, KyuuTae Week day 5, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-28
Updated: 2017-04-28
Packaged: 2018-10-25 02:08:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10754532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Midday/pseuds/Midday
Summary: 'I love you,' Kyuubei says. Tears are falling down her face and seeping into her shirt. And it's fine - even though the shirt will need to be washed later in the freezing water under the tap in the back garden - because no one falls in love for forever when they are twelve.





	The Anatomy of Existence

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea why, but it took me two years and a lot of enka songs to finish this. Also, enka is great.

**i.**

The sheets are long unwashed. They reek of sweat and cheap booze and no one seems to mind.

She wakes up.

The lamp is not working once again, one single spark of light lingers on the wire of a bare lightbulb. Or it never stopped not working, she doesn't know and can't remember. It's not like it matters, really. She leaves before sunset and comes back by the time the night turns into gray, dim, shapeless dawn. She comes back into the room full of spiders and moths and ghosts and they don't need light to stay alive.

A hand grazes her hip and it's cold, freezing cold.

She shivers. Her fingers run on the floor by the bed, searching for the discarded shirt she could put back on. It's not even a nice shirt, just the one she won in the grocery lottery years ago, and it's torn on the back  where she leans on the wall. It's fine. She's not picky. She's cold, that's what matters, and wants to get dressed and be alone and run as far as she could get and the shirt could grant her at least two of those. Three, if the person in her bed wakes up. It's not a nice shirt and she doesn't look nice and somehow she doesn't find the energy to mind.

The sheets are crumpled and they look like ocean waves.

There is no shirt on the floor. She stands up. Her pale ankles look like bare bones in the dark, like joints of a carcass clawed by ravens and left to rot in sun. She finds painkillers in the cupboard, takes them with a cup of water and wonders whether her brother eats well. The clock tick eleven in the morning. She tries to remember what is it like, to wake up and go to sleep at times other people do, to eat lunch and come home like other people do, to something else but void. She cannot.

The blinds are closed and they have never been opened and she likes them that way.

There are neon yellow post-it cards on the fridge. She takes one and makes a list of things to do. The edge of her chair digs into naked skin of her thigh as she writes Call brother, Buy detergent, Take Kagura shopping, Do the laundry, Don't look at the postcard. She crosses the last one with straight, thick line. Her cheekbones hurt and she realizes she's been smiling. She ponders writing Don't smile on the bottom of her list instead. She doesn't. There should be another word for that involuntary, strained cramp of cheeks she's wearing, and, after all, he wouldn't approve. She puts the note on the fridge, among all the other notes from all the other days. They all have one line crossed and she doesn't look at them.

Some of them have two lines crossed, but that was long, long time ago. Before the nights, and ghosts, and men with no face buried in sheets with no warm. It happens, she says to herself. She's not getting better at lying.

The person in her bed stirs and the waves move, ebb and tide, ebb and tide.

She dresses up and leaves, as if the room wasn't hers, as if she had somewhere else to go, before the man wakes up. She is not concerned; there is nothing to steal, anyways.

 

ii.

'Let's go home,' she says.

Hands are on her waist and they are cold, small and cold and trembling.

'I'm not mad,' she says, because she cannot say that she is sad and confused and a bit afraid.

The fingers feel like spiders wandering on her goosebumps on a strip of bare skin between her shirt and her skirt. She wonders if she should swat them away.

'I'm not going anywhere,' she says and she's not lying. She's too old to believe in happy endings.

The playground looks scary in lurking twilight. They are old for that, too, for both playgrounds and being scared of shadows, when there are other, real things to be scared of.

'I love you,' her friend says. Tears are falling down her face and seeping into her shirt. And it's fine - even though the shirt will need to be washed later in the freezing water under the tap in the back garden - because no one falls in love for forever when they are twelve.

'You can kiss me if you want,' she offers and she knows that the offer will not be taken.

They never speak of it again.

 

iii.

She finds a job in a host club, shabby, greasy little establishment in the back alley several stops from Ginza. They are not very particular about her age, not as much as about her skinny elbows and clumsily padded bra and her confidence that is not hers. Her heels stick to the floor covered with layers of spilt drinks. She feels trapped, like a fly in a scorching heat of summer, and she fails at convincing herself that it's okay, that it will be okay.

Their father died in summer, too. She remembers smell of his decaying sweat, jarring sound of cicadas on the terrace and a postcard that came two weeks too late.

The host club is not such a bad place, after all; they pay her and sometimes even on time, she’s allowed to drink enough to forget and not enough to remember again, Her patrons are old, husbands of wives they were taught not to love and fathers of children they were taught not to cherish. She feels like a surrogate daughter, bought for a night and then sold again under the immortal neon city lights.

The first time one of them tries to kiss her is when she’s wearing pink dress. 

She doesn’t not like the idea of it; she feels like she has a lot of feelings, enough to burst, and she bought romance novels and erotic magazines from her meager wage and they didn’t help. And she’s been kissed before, even though she told her it wouldn’t count. Her lips were cold and chapped and trembling and it was so long ago the memory could have belonged to a whole another age, whole another person. 

She’s wearing a pink dress and the short skirt is running up her tights.They’re ugly, lumpy and full of stretchmarks like a lightning curse for being a woman; in the flattering pale light of the bar they look unmarred and unworldly. His fingers look like sacrilege embodied, and feel thrice so. She thinks of marble statues of Western saints, and of cooked rice back at home that must’ve gone stale already, and she’s drunk, so drunk. His fingers smell of office paper and pickled seaweed. His necktie has an ugly print of sea shells. He puts his lips to her jaw and Oryou from the next stall cheers and claps and Otae pretends it’s for her.

She tries to pretend - mind hazy, eyes unfocused, neons flickering to the rhythm of a heartbeat - that it’s someone else’s lips on her skin. It’s not working; she knows it will never work. He whispers something to her ear, kissing her earlobe and she has words locked on the back of her tongue;  _ no  _ like back then,  _ I can’t  _ like back then.  _ I hate you _ , like back then.

The man - the men, all of them - tastes of champagne. It’s how she wants it. Champagne tastes of sugar and sparkles and artificial, neon-tinted dreams.

She comes home after sunrise to a sleeping brother and unwashed dishes. She feels like laughing and she doesn’t know why.

 

iv.

They are sixteen, with stolen license and ancient car, on the countryside roads that lead from nowhere to nowhere.

“You’ll pass,” she screams, because the windows are open and the radio is blasting some enka from the cassettes found in the trunk. Kyuubei doesn’t look a bit like her father, and she probably replies something in that sense, but her reply is carried away by harsh wind and  _ Woman in Shinjuku _ . The farmers harvest early rice, just faded smudges on the background of unbelievable green. There’s a sun over the horizon, and if they hurry, they might catch it, it seems.

_ What a fool, what a fool I am _ , they sing to the beat of a tubercular combustion engine. The car smells of gasoline and terrible pine-scented air-freshener bought deep into 80’s; Tae sticks her arm out the window and waves greetings to the skies and hills and telephone wires she will never see again. It’s the last summer before  _ the last summer _ and she needs to hurry, hurry, run away and back again, stay in motion before the adulthood binds her.

Kyuubei is saying something. She’s laughing; it’s a good sight. Tae wants her to laugh. She’s got long silky hair, the kind seen only in shampoo adverts, slender fingers and ugly shapeless jeans that look great on her. Girls like her are born for laughing, Tae thinks, for summer pool parties and flower crowns and other stuff she remembers from music videos and trashy American movies. Tae is wearing old shorts with ketchup stain on left thigh and she’s mystified, really. She says it aloud and the wind carries it where it’s not important anymore.

They stop at a gas station. It looks like it survived an apocalypse or two and the lady behind the counter pays more attention to her cat than to them. Tae buys coffee and a packet of crisps and regrets they cannot buy beer. The coffee tastes like dirty rainwater and she drinks it sitting on the front lid of the car. Sometime between the liquid getting lukewarm and the nasty sugar and coffee grounds remains on the bottom of the cup Kyuubei sits next to her. Their knees and shoulders are touching; it’s a little weird, with the silence and looming sunset and the feeling of detachment from everything they left behind in an immeasurable distance. Kyuubei’s hair sparkle like woven from golden threads in the dying sunlight. Without thinking, Tae touches them.

There was a distance they were keeping since they were twelve and speaking of love; Tae didn’t notice until she shattered it.

‘I’m going to cut them,’ Kyuubei says. She doesn’t move. Her eyes are kept firmly on the cartography of rust on the gas station backdoor.

‘Why?’ 

‘I don’t feel like a girl,’ Kyuubei says, as if every word was meticulously carved out of her own skin. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

Tae knows she was just trusted with the secret she does not deserve to keep. She knows she should feel the weight of it; the only thing she keeps thinking is  _ the beautiful hair, give them to me, I’ll take good care _ .

‘So you feel like a boy?’ she says, because it’s time to say something. She’s heard of those people, they are in talks around Kabukicho, with their own bars and shows.

‘I don’t know,’ Kyuubei says. ‘I’m not sure.’ 

After a minute of silence, she adds: ‘I don’t think so.’

Tae is confused, now, and rather cold; she regrets touching Kyuubei’s hair and going to this trip. She wants to go back to the car and fall asleep and wake up back in Tokyo, without all the complicated nonsense.

She opens the pack of crisps instead, because she doesn’t know what to do with her hands.’What are you going to do now?”’she asks.

‘I,’ says Kyuubei. The dusk has fallen and she looks lost in the shadows, lost and tired and a bit ethereal, like a moth that woke into daylight. ‘Stay with me?’

Tae doesn’t even notice; her hand is in grasp suddenly, her body turned to face Kyuubei. It doesn’t hurt, but she’s scared nonetheless. Kyuubei’s eyes, what’s visible of them in the murky twilight, are desperate and terrified. ‘Stay with me, I love you,’ she says and it sounds either as a plea or an order.

‘I don’t- ‘ Tae wants to say, but the words are swallowed; there are lips on her lips and they are ice cold, taking what they didn’t get back then, years ago. And it’s not good. Even if Tae gives little importance to the idea of sacred first kiss, their noses collide uncomfortably, she tastes the cheap coffee and back then, she wanted to be kissed out of some curiosity. She doesn’t want to now.

The feeling of tongue opening her pliant mouth wakes her up from the stupor; she pushes Kyuubei back until she falls from the car and cries  _ no no no  _ until she’s sure Kyuubei understands. No, she’s not sure. Kyuubei just lies on the dew-covered grass with empty eyes.

‘I hate you,’ Tae says. She opens the door to the car and takes out her bag, her jacket and her phone. She has no plan, stranded in the end of nowhere, with only enough money for food and one or two tank refills. She notices she’s shaking, but whether from cold or from anger, she does not know.

‘Right.’ Kyuubei takes out her wallet. She counts banknotes in the sum Tae has barely seen before. ‘Take a taxi to the next train station. This should be enough to get you to Tokyo.’ She looks like she wants to say something more, much more, but after a moment of silence she just adds: ‘Take care.’

It’s not until the car lights disappear beyond the horizon they wanted to reach and she’s waiting for the earliest morning shinkansen when Tae realizes Kyuubei is not coming back. Not for her. Never.   
  


v.

There is a lot of people in this city.

Tae hasn’t really noticed before; her days start when people are still just insentient shadows creeping restlessly behind the windows of office buildings, and they end when the windows are dark and empty and turned into mirrors for infinite reflections of dying neons. Tae likes moths and likes to imagine herself as one, crawling bravely through the dusk in search of enticing light to get burned. She’s more of a silverfish; invisible, insignificant and lost in a big, big city and bigger world.

The subway is packed and suffocating in the sweltering heat. Her blue denim dress is soaked in sweat and clings tightly like hands of a groper.

She wonders why it’s frowned upon to visit graveyards at dawn.

She’s got money only for four stops. It’s fine; this way, she can avoid the building of their old house. The hydrangeas must be out of bloom already and without them, the garden always looked austere, just like their father liked it. She doesn’t remember what happened to the house after he died. 

‘Good morning, father,’ she says to the headstone. The graveyard is not empty, and the old ladies and housewives with babies in wraps nearby eye her curiously. Or they don’t; she feels like wearing a giant, flickering, neon-coloured sign, just like the one over the entrance of her bar. The headstone doesn’t answer.

‘Shinpachi is fine,’ she says, ‘has a part-time job now. Eats well.’

The water is poured over the granite hot from sun. It sizzles, and she tries to remember what rites are done when visiting graves. She feels like a child, the one that was never taught how to read or wash hands. She sits on a bench and taps the water ladle on the stone. It’s a song; she hums the tune and doesn’t search her memory for a name. 

‘I’m fine, too,’ she says, because that’s what she would say had her father been alive. ‘I have an apartment and a job. It pays well, you know. Everything is fine.’

A housewife with a stroller full of child passes her. Her stare seems half-haughty, half-disbelieving, and that’s right, too, because Tae doesn’t believe herself either. She wishes for a small, personal graveyard, away from the city, where she could talk and scream and cry and lie down to the dead, dusty stone. She waters a tiny bush of rosemary instead, because that seems like a more productive thing to do.

She takes a packed milk bread, store-bought dumplings and a bottle of sake out of her bag. The bread is for her to eat; the rest seemed like the offerings she’s seen on other people’s graves. She puts dumplings on a plate and pours a cup of sake. Just like on other people’s graves, it will be eaten by cats and sparrows and for some reason, that seems perfectly adequate.

For the lack of something better to do, she resumes the ladle-tapping, before she recognizes the tune. She was sure it was supposed to be  _ something,  _ a track from Keiko Fuji enka album, passenger announcement tune from a tiny countryside train station, a beat from after-midnight mixtape from her bar, maybe a merry-go-round music from years ago.  It’s a song from laundry detergent commercial.

She sits there until the cats come, and then until the sun starts setting. She drinks all the sake and she knows her father will not miss it anymore.

 

vi.

Kyuubei’s hair are long and soft, even when matted with blood and mud and gravel.

The sound of running water echoes in the bathroom. The lamp flickers with ugly pale green light. There is a calendar from three years ago hanging on the wall and no one knows what for.

Tae’s fingers thread slowly through the knots. Water is turning red and brown and she feels sick to her stomach. Smell of blood and sweat overpowers mint-scented shampoo. Kyuubei is sitting in the tube, naked and curled, vertebrae protruding from her back, skin covered in bruises dark like galaxies.

‘What happened?’ Tae asks. Her voice is unpleasantly sharp in the small bathroom. She’s not asking to get an answer; she doesn’t want to think how her fingers are coming near to the skin of Kyuubei’s head and that, in itself, seems more, much more intimate than kissing or sex or love confessions. 

‘Nothing,’ says Kyuubei. She’s not crying, or shaking, or anything Tae would have expected from anyone else. Fingers are touching the back of her neck, grazing her ears and Tae wonders how much of self-control does it take. ‘They were offending you and your father. I just asked them to stop.’

Tae knows she’s lying. Shinpachi was out there, watching from behind the corner and running home in tears. She would know she was lying even without that; it’s been years since she learned to read Kyuubei like a book of pinky tremors and tiny wrinkles between eyebrows. She doesn’t say anything. She feels soft skin under her fingertips and the vibrations of content hums and it’s time to stop and wash the shampoo off and Tae doesn’t want to.

‘You’re not my prince,’ she says.

‘No,’ Kyuubei says. Her head is tilted back now, for Tae to wash her fringe. She’s not meeting Tae’s eyes. Small bubbles landed on her eyelashes and Tae stares at them until they pop. A drop of foam slides to the fissure between Kyuubei’s arm and naked chest. Tae doesn’t follow it, she really doesn’t.

‘I could be,’ the running water whispers. Tae pretends not to hear. That’s what they are getting good at, she thinks, like real adults. The water is cold now, biting cold, and it seems like a good reason for Kyuubei’s trembling lips and Tae’s shaking hands. She’s not washing hair anymore.

‘I don’t need one,’ she says.

‘I could be,’ Kyuubei whispers. Her galaxies are swirling; there are constellations on her knees, meteor showers on her toes. The water is bloody and it looks like universe’s biggest carnage. She leans back and dunks her head underwater to rinse the hair and it’s stars old and dead and born anew.

‘I don’t want it,’ Tae says, but she’s not sure what  _ it _ is and why she shouldn’t want it.

The stars explode and turn into dust.

 

vii.

The sheets are fresh from dryer, but the smell will never be washed away.

She’s sitting on the counter, wearing pajama pants and old, no longer fitting bra. She’s writing a to-do list on a napkin, because she’s out of post-it notes. The fridge door is covered with the used ones and she thinks it looks like a shrine to some merciless god of oblivion. Some of them have one or two lines crossed; some of them do not; some of them have nothing but date written on them.

There is a postcard under them all, stained with spilled coffee and curled and smudged from that time she did not pay her electricity bills and the fridge defrosted. She’s not sure where it’s from; Okinawa or Kamakura or Fukuoka, maybe. There is nothing written on it except the address of her old house. There was never a reply expected.

The bell rings.

She startles. Shinpachi is not expected from his job until after five, and by then she’s supposed to have enough time left to dress, clean the flat and plaster a believable smile and brave front. Letterman doesn’t bring anything but bills and the most recent ones are still unpaid laying on the windowsill. Kagura would call first.

She slides down from the counter and swears, because her feet are burning from wearing heels too high the night before.

The hall is dark; there are no windows and the lights are sometimes working and sometimes not. There is a shadow of a person and Tae doesn’t know them. They have short hair and broad shoulders, straight posture and scent of car fumes and pleasant weariness. They must have mistaken the door, she thinks.

The light decides to flicker back on and she sees their face and she knows, oh, she  _ knows. _

“I’m back,” Kyuubei - if it’s still Kyuubei, she doesn’t know- says. She (he? they? she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know) is looking at her, not like before, not like back than, not like before the  _ before _ . Constellations overturned;  _ what fools, what fools we are. _

Her bra is stained and her makeup is smudged; she’s a hostess in a shady bar and lost, so lost, much more than at twelve and fifteen and sixteen. None of it seems to matter anymore.

“Welcome home,” she says.


End file.
